Strange patterns in my apache logs
Posted Mon, 20 Aug 2007
A few weeks ago, ajaxrain.com linked to my jquery
puffer example. I randomly peruse my apache logs looking for new inbound
link activity or new search activity.
I saw lots of hits with a referrer of ajaxrain.com but were to pages not linked from that site. I thought this was someone's webbrowser with prefetch gone crazy, but apache logs tell me what it is. An example log is this:
203.190.116.249 - - [07/Aug/2007:15:05:01 -0400] "GET /projects/xboxproxy HTTP/1.0" 301 467 "http://www.ajaxrain.com/" "Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; HTTrack 3.0x; Windows 98)"HTTrack? Windows 98? Mozilla 4.5? Ooookay. Sure.
Turns out HTTrack is a "website copier" tool. It isn't very nice to the webserver, as it requests many pages per second.